Decentralization: The Effect on the PRR and the City of Philadelphia
During the first and second industrial revolutions American industry were centralized. It was important for an industry to be near resources and a means of transportation. One of the primary means of transportation during centralization was the railroad. The railroad, more specifically the Pennsylvania Railroad, known as the PRR, was a key symbol of centralization connecting one city to another and bringing people outside city limits inside. In the early 20th century the PRR would become one of the largest publicly traded corporations in the world. Centralization benefited not only the PRR but the City of Philadelphia as well. As more industries were created in the city the population began a rapid rise due to people looking for work.
Following the World War II the Federal Government began a conscious effort to decentralize for economic and defense reasons. Realizing that a country dependent on railroads were at a disadvantage defensively the Federal Government looked to a new primary means of transportation. The railroads were then abandoned by the public for other means of transportation such as cars and trucks.
The City of Philadelphia also felt the effects of decentralization through suburbanization and deindustrialization, the processes of the population and industries moving out the city limits respectively. From 1960 to 1980 the population of Philadelphia decreased by 300,000 thus decreasing the city’s tax base. This paper will argue that the bankruptcy of the PRR and crisis of the City of Philadelphia are a byproduct of being abandoned by the Federal Government and the public.
In the 1840’s a need for a railroad connecting Pittsburgh and Philadelphia was becoming increasingly important for the city of Philadelphia. Because of Pittsburgh’s geographical location, with the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers forming the Ohio River, it had become a leading trade center. At the time a railroad being constructed from Baltimore to Ohio was approaching Pittsburgh. If the railroad line were to reach Pittsburgh, Philadelphia would lose trade from the western half of the state.
It wasn’t until 1845 that a meeting was held to call the citizens of Philadelphia to support a through railroad from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. The meeting opposed the extension of the Baltimore and Ohio to Pittsburgh and created a committee that would create a legislation supporting the railroad. On January 22, 1846, William W. Hailey from Philadelphia introduced a bill for the creation of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad Company. For the next two and half months of discussions were held on whether to incorporate the Pennsylvania Central Railroad Company or to allow the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad company to construct the railroad from Baltimore through Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh. On March 19th and the 26th the bill was passed through the House and Senate respectively. “The Act incorporating The Pennsylvania Railroad Company, commonly referred to as its Charter, was signed by the Governor of the State on April 13, 1846 (Burgess, p. 39).” The Pennsylvania Railroad company’s headquarters would be located in Philadelphia, PA.
At its peak the Pennsylvania Railroad controlled over 10,000 miles of rail helping make it the largest rail system in terms of revenue and traffic in the 20th century. The PRR had employed about 250,000 workers and paid annual dividends to its shareholders for over 100 years. After a century of rapid growth the rail system began to decline in the 1920’s with competition from the automobile, busses, and trucks.
A revival did begin during World War II that benefited and hurt the railroad system. The PRR was one of the most active railroads during the war and even switched their advertising to support the war effort. Passenger riders greatly increased due to the rationing of gas and the PRR carried wartime freight with massive amount of material and troops needed to be moved around the country. Because of the PRR’s heavy usage during the war maintenance on its equipment was deferred.
On June 29, 1956, five years after WWII, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 was put into effect when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill. The signing of the bill into law started the largest public works project in American history at that point and over the next 20 years 41,000 miles of interstate highways was constructed. The Federal Aid Highway Act along with the availability of better cars would factor in to the decline of the PRR and the suburbanization and deindustrialization of the City of Philadelphia.
President Eisenhower, first Republican President since Herbert Hoover, had many reasons for signing the bill. The first was looking at it as a way of preventing another depression like 1929 that many linked to Hoover. He wanted to prove that a republican President could strengthen the economy and an interstate system was a great way to accomplish this goal. “Simply put, the president knew he could not fail with highways. Highway building would be popular with the electorate, fiscally sound, and above all would give people jobs (Lewis, p. 86).”
Beyond the benefits a highway system would give the economy, Eisenhower was also understood of the benefits is provided to the defense of the nation. In the European theatre of the war the Allied Forces found that it was much harder destroy Germany mobility along the Autobahn than the railroads. During strategic bombing when a railroad was targeted only a section of the track needed to be removed to disrupt the train for days. While on the Autobahn a convoy could still get through even with bomb craters covering the road. Eisenhower even traveled on the Autobahn post V-E Day an experience he remembered when he became President. ““I decided…to put an emphasis upon this kind of road building,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs (Lewis, p. 91).”
Due to the deferred maintenance of its equipment the PRR found itself in bad shape at the end of the war. Despite its efforts, in 1968, unable to carry the momentum of a revival the PRR merged with the New York Central to form Penn Central Transportation because of the challenges facing both railroad companies. The peak of the railroad companies decline occurred two years after the merger when Penn Central Transportation filed for bankruptcy in 1970.
The combination of the Federal Aid Highway Act and other factors would also prove to have a negative effect on the railroads. Along with the construction of interstate highways the railroads were also abandoned by the public for other methods of transportation. Production restrictions that were imposed on manufacturers during the Korean War in order to manufacture war items had been lifted. With the restrictions being lifted automobile companies were able to produce better and cheaper cars. Some cars now came with power steering, automatic transitions, heater and turn signals. “Statistics for the decade between 1950 and 1960 revealed…the number of families owning automobiles rose from sixty to seventy-seven percent…In the same decade the number of railway passenger cars declined from 37,359 to 25,746 (Lewis, p. 81).”
The PRR not only lost passengers to the highway system but had also lost freight traffic as the US Government had used the Interstate Highway Act to create commercial channels for shipping. Not only were Americans automobiles getting better but so were trucks so much that it became possible to ship goods 400-500 miles overnight by trucks in the 1970’s. America had now depended on trucks as never before as statistics showed “…shipping goods by truck increased 257 percent between 1955 and 1990 (Lewis, p. 286).”
Just as the PRR the City of Philadelphia was negatively impacted by the Federal Governments move away from centralization. The population of Philadelphia began a rapid decline as people began to move outside of the city. Industries that had multi-story factories along the city’s waterfront began to move out of the cities limits.
During the first and second industrial revolutions more and more people moved to the cities looking for jobs. The City of Philadelphia’s population increased by over a million people between 1870 and 1950 along with the increase in the cities industries. However, following the Second World War the trend changed and the population began to move away from the city as suburbanization and deindustrialization began to take effect.
One of the reasons for suburbanization was changes in the Federal Housing Act and the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, commonly known as the GI bill. As a way of not letting down the troops that came back from the war, President Roosevelt and Congress passed the GI bill unanimously. The GI bill guaranteed veterans loans to buy houses and also allowed them to attend college or a trade school basically free of charge. However, there was a severe housing shortage when the veterans returned from the war. The Federal Government wanting to create new housing and decentralize made changes to the Federal Housing Act that gave profit incentives to builders who built large developments in suburban areas. Not only were the veterans moving to the suburbs but the middle class were beginning to as well as the impact of the housing crisis did not only affect the veterans. Houses in the suburbs were not a new idea at the time but the difference was how far outside of city limits the houses were built. Without the presence of interstates and better cars the reach that suburbanization had made would not have been possible. Before the war many in the working class that lived outside of the city limits were limited to houses near railroads. In fact before interstates one of the main selling points used was how long it took to walk to the railroad.
Another factor in Philadelphia’s crisis was the deindustrialization of the city. Before the Second World War Northeast and Midwest cities were the symbols of industrialization. Their populations were rapidly increasing and numerous amounts of multi-story factories were being built. Following the end of the war and start of the Cold War many of the industries began to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the Southwest and Southeast known as the Sunbelt.
Industries began to move to the Sunbelt due to a couple of reasons. The first was the Federal Government channeling an increasing amount of resources to the Sunbelt. The Sunbelt became a main beneficiary of the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. Finally, industries began to move to the South to gain access to rapidly growing areas of the country that had low labor costs, such as California. In many of the prewar industrial cities high labor costs due to the strength of their unions was a common trend. To avoid these costs companies were able to move to areas that had nonunion labor.
The deindustrialization of Philadelphia was also made possible by an increase in mobility. During centralization it was important for industry to be near water or railroads, the main forms of transportation. With better cars and interstate highways it became less important to be in high taxed areas like cities. Many industries began to move outside of the city limits in order to save money on taxes. With an increase in the trucking industry it now became possible for a company to ship goods long distances without being near a railroad. “New factories appeared on rural hillsides, in former cornfields, and in cleared forest, and the shells of old manufacturing buildings loomed over towns and cities that were depopulated when businesses relocated production in more profitable places (Sugrue, p. 127).”
The demise of the PRR was a byproduct of political decisions and the unconscious and conscious abandonment of the public. The postwar decentralized American cities were created through suburbanization and deindustrialization. The PRR no longer exists and Philadelphia along with other Northeast and Midwest cities are known as the rustbelt. In the end, decentralization had caused one of the largest publicly traded companies in the 20th century to file for bankruptcy and left Philadelphia in the crisis that it currently is in today.
Pennsylvania Railroad. Which is Cheaper? Brochure. Author.
"Railroad Map of Pennsylvania - 1893." Map.
"Railroad Map of Pennsylvania - 1912." Map.
Secondary:
Alexander, Edwin P. On the main line; the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 19th century. 1st ed. New York: C.N. Potter, 1971.
Banfield, Edward C. The unheavenly city; the nature and future of our urban crisis. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
Burgess, George H. Centennial history of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846-1946. New York: Arno P, 1976.
"Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System." NationalAtlas.gov. 20 Jan. 2009.
"History of the Interstate Highway System." Federal Highway Administration. 20 Jan. 2009.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass frontier: the suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
Lewis, Tom. Divided highways: building the interstate highways, transforming American life. New York: Viking, 1997.
Murphy, John. The Eisenhower Interstate System. New York: Chelsea House, 2009.
Railway Age Gazette. Vol. 59. Simmons-Boardman Pub. Co., 1915.
Salsbury, Stephen. No way to run a railroad: the untold story of the Penn Central crisis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.
Stanback, Thomas M. Suburbanization and the city. Montclair: Allanheld, Osmun, 1976.
Sugrue, Thomas J. The origins of the urban crisis: race and inequality in postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.
The Effect on the PRR and the City of Philadelphia
During the first and second industrial revolutions American industry were centralized. It was important for an industry to be near resources and a means of transportation. One of the primary means of transportation during centralization was the railroad. The railroad, more specifically the Pennsylvania Railroad, known as the PRR, was a key symbol of centralization connecting one city to another and bringing people outside city limits inside. In the early 20th century the PRR would become one of the largest publicly traded corporations in the world. Centralization benefited not only the PRR but the City of Philadelphia as well. As more industries were created in the city the population began a rapid rise due to people looking for work.
Following the World War II the Federal Government began a conscious effort to decentralize for economic and defense reasons. Realizing that a country dependent on railroads were at a disadvantage defensively the Federal Government looked to a new primary means of transportation. The railroads were then abandoned by the public for other means of transportation such as cars and trucks.
The City of Philadelphia also felt the effects of decentralization through suburbanization and deindustrialization, the processes of the population and industries moving out the city limits respectively. From 1960 to 1980 the population of Philadelphia decreased by 300,000 thus decreasing the city’s tax base. This paper will argue that the bankruptcy of the PRR and crisis of the City of Philadelphia are a byproduct of being abandoned by the Federal Government and the public.
In the 1840’s a need for a railroad connecting Pittsburgh and Philadelphia was becoming increasingly important for the city of Philadelphia. Because of Pittsburgh’s geographical location, with the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers forming the Ohio River, it had become a leading trade center. At the time a railroad being constructed from Baltimore to Ohio was approaching Pittsburgh. If the railroad line were to reach Pittsburgh, Philadelphia would lose trade from the western half of the state.
It wasn’t until 1845 that a meeting was held to call the citizens of Philadelphia to support a through railroad from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. The meeting opposed the extension of the Baltimore and Ohio to Pittsburgh and created a committee that would create a legislation supporting the railroad. On January 22, 1846, William W. Hailey from Philadelphia introduced a bill for the creation of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad Company. For the next two and half months of discussions were held on whether to incorporate the Pennsylvania Central Railroad Company or to allow the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad company to construct the railroad from Baltimore through Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh. On March 19th and the 26th the bill was passed through the House and Senate respectively. “The Act incorporating The Pennsylvania Railroad Company, commonly referred to as its Charter, was signed by the Governor of the State on April 13, 1846 (Burgess, p. 39).” The Pennsylvania Railroad company’s headquarters would be located in Philadelphia, PA.
At its peak the Pennsylvania Railroad controlled over 10,000 miles of rail helping make it the largest rail system in terms of revenue and traffic in the 20th century. The PRR had employed about 250,000 workers and paid annual dividends to its shareholders for over 100 years. After a century of rapid growth the rail system began to decline in the 1920’s with competition from the automobile, busses, and trucks.
A revival did begin during World War II that benefited and hurt the railroad system. The PRR was one of the most active railroads during the war and even switched their advertising to support the war effort. Passenger riders greatly increased due to the rationing of gas and the PRR carried wartime freight with massive amount of material and troops needed to be moved around the country. Because of the PRR’s heavy usage during the war maintenance on its equipment was deferred.
On June 29, 1956, five years after WWII, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 was put into effect when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill. The signing of the bill into law started the largest public works project in American history at that point and over the next 20 years 41,000 miles of interstate highways was constructed. The Federal Aid Highway Act along with the availability of better cars would factor in to the decline of the PRR and the suburbanization and deindustrialization of the City of Philadelphia.
President Eisenhower, first Republican President since Herbert Hoover, had many reasons for signing the bill. The first was looking at it as a way of preventing another depression like 1929 that many linked to Hoover. He wanted to prove that a republican President could strengthen the economy and an interstate system was a great way to accomplish this goal. “Simply put, the president knew he could not fail with highways. Highway building would be popular with the electorate, fiscally sound, and above all would give people jobs (Lewis, p. 86).”
Beyond the benefits a highway system would give the economy, Eisenhower was also understood of the benefits is provided to the defense of the nation. In the European theatre of the war the Allied Forces found that it was much harder destroy Germany mobility along the Autobahn than the railroads. During strategic bombing when a railroad was targeted only a section of the track needed to be removed to disrupt the train for days. While on the Autobahn a convoy could still get through even with bomb craters covering the road. Eisenhower even traveled on the Autobahn post V-E Day an experience he remembered when he became President. ““I decided…to put an emphasis upon this kind of road building,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs (Lewis, p. 91).”
Due to the deferred maintenance of its equipment the PRR found itself in bad shape at the end of the war. Despite its efforts, in 1968, unable to carry the momentum of a revival the PRR merged with the New York Central to form Penn Central Transportation because of the challenges facing both railroad companies. The peak of the railroad companies decline occurred two years after the merger when Penn Central Transportation filed for bankruptcy in 1970.
The combination of the Federal Aid Highway Act and other factors would also prove to have a negative effect on the railroads. Along with the construction of interstate highways the railroads were also abandoned by the public for other methods of transportation. Production restrictions that were imposed on manufacturers during the Korean War in order to manufacture war items had been lifted. With the restrictions being lifted automobile companies were able to produce better and cheaper cars. Some cars now came with power steering, automatic transitions, heater and turn signals. “Statistics for the decade between 1950 and 1960 revealed…the number of families owning automobiles rose from sixty to seventy-seven percent…In the same decade the number of railway passenger cars declined from 37,359 to 25,746 (Lewis, p. 81).”
The PRR not only lost passengers to the highway system but had also lost freight traffic as the US Government had used the Interstate Highway Act to create commercial channels for shipping. Not only were Americans automobiles getting better but so were trucks so much that it became possible to ship goods 400-500 miles overnight by trucks in the 1970’s. America had now depended on trucks as never before as statistics showed “…shipping goods by truck increased 257 percent between 1955 and 1990 (Lewis, p. 286).”
Just as the PRR the City of Philadelphia was negatively impacted by the Federal Governments move away from centralization. The population of Philadelphia began a rapid decline as people began to move outside of the city. Industries that had multi-story factories along the city’s waterfront began to move out of the cities limits.
During the first and second industrial revolutions more and more people moved to the cities looking for jobs. The City of Philadelphia’s population increased by over a million people between 1870 and 1950 along with the increase in the cities industries. However, following the Second World War the trend changed and the population began to move away from the city as suburbanization and deindustrialization began to take effect.
One of the reasons for suburbanization was changes in the Federal Housing Act and the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, commonly known as the GI bill. As a way of not letting down the troops that came back from the war, President Roosevelt and Congress passed the GI bill unanimously. The GI bill guaranteed veterans loans to buy houses and also allowed them to attend college or a trade school basically free of charge. However, there was a severe housing shortage when the veterans returned from the war. The Federal Government wanting to create new housing and decentralize made changes to the Federal Housing Act that gave profit incentives to builders who built large developments in suburban areas. Not only were the veterans moving to the suburbs but the middle class were beginning to as well as the impact of the housing crisis did not only affect the veterans. Houses in the suburbs were not a new idea at the time but the difference was how far outside of city limits the houses were built. Without the presence of interstates and better cars the reach that suburbanization had made would not have been possible. Before the war many in the working class that lived outside of the city limits were limited to houses near railroads. In fact before interstates one of the main selling points used was how long it took to walk to the railroad.
Another factor in Philadelphia’s crisis was the deindustrialization of the city. Before the Second World War Northeast and Midwest cities were the symbols of industrialization. Their populations were rapidly increasing and numerous amounts of multi-story factories were being built. Following the end of the war and start of the Cold War many of the industries began to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the Southwest and Southeast known as the Sunbelt.
Industries began to move to the Sunbelt due to a couple of reasons. The first was the Federal Government channeling an increasing amount of resources to the Sunbelt. The Sunbelt became a main beneficiary of the military-industrial complex of the Cold War. Finally, industries began to move to the South to gain access to rapidly growing areas of the country that had low labor costs, such as California. In many of the prewar industrial cities high labor costs due to the strength of their unions was a common trend. To avoid these costs companies were able to move to areas that had nonunion labor.
The deindustrialization of Philadelphia was also made possible by an increase in mobility. During centralization it was important for industry to be near water or railroads, the main forms of transportation. With better cars and interstate highways it became less important to be in high taxed areas like cities. Many industries began to move outside of the city limits in order to save money on taxes. With an increase in the trucking industry it now became possible for a company to ship goods long distances without being near a railroad. “New factories appeared on rural hillsides, in former cornfields, and in cleared forest, and the shells of old manufacturing buildings loomed over towns and cities that were depopulated when businesses relocated production in more profitable places (Sugrue, p. 127).”
The demise of the PRR was a byproduct of political decisions and the unconscious and conscious abandonment of the public. The postwar decentralized American cities were created through suburbanization and deindustrialization. The PRR no longer exists and Philadelphia along with other Northeast and Midwest cities are known as the rustbelt. In the end, decentralization had caused one of the largest publicly traded companies in the 20th century to file for bankruptcy and left Philadelphia in the crisis that it currently is in today.
Bibliography
Primary:
"National Interstate and Defense Highway Act (1956)." Our Documents. 20 Jan. 2009.
Pennsylvania Railroad. Which is Cheaper? Brochure. Author.
"Railroad Map of Pennsylvania - 1893." Map.
"Railroad Map of Pennsylvania - 1912." Map.
Secondary:
Alexander, Edwin P. On the main line; the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 19th century. 1st ed. New York: C.N. Potter, 1971.
Banfield, Edward C. The unheavenly city; the nature and future of our urban crisis. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
Burgess, George H. Centennial history of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846-1946. New York: Arno P, 1976.
"Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System." NationalAtlas.gov. 20 Jan. 2009.
"History of the Interstate Highway System." Federal Highway Administration. 20 Jan. 2009.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass frontier: the suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
Lewis, Tom. Divided highways: building the interstate highways, transforming American life. New York: Viking, 1997.
Murphy, John. The Eisenhower Interstate System. New York: Chelsea House, 2009.
Railway Age Gazette. Vol. 59. Simmons-Boardman Pub. Co., 1915.
Salsbury, Stephen. No way to run a railroad: the untold story of the Penn Central crisis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.
Stanback, Thomas M. Suburbanization and the city. Montclair: Allanheld, Osmun, 1976.
Sugrue, Thomas J. The origins of the urban crisis: race and inequality in postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.
Reference:
"Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956." Wikipedia. 20 Jan. 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956>.
"Penn Central." Wikipedia. 18 Jan. 2009. 20 Jan. 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_Central>.
"Pennsylvania Railroad." Wikipedia. 20 Jan. 2009 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad>.
"Railroad." Answers.com. 20 Jan. 2009
<http://www.answers.com/topic/railroad>.